Les Fiancés

A nice, small film much in the vein of Olmi's earlier Il posto, which was one of the best films I saw in 2012. The film follows an engaged couple (the title translates to The Fiances). The man (Carlo Cabrini) accepts a post in a far-away factory for an extended period of time, leaving his fiancée (Anna Canzi) home alone. There's not much to it plotwise. It's kind of a mood piece, as the two experience life apart, trying to enjoy it but not really being able to. It's quite lovely, but, I have to say, I didn't really connect to it emotionally anywhere near the level that I did with Il posto. I can see viewers reacting similarly to Il posto, because that, too, was a very small, simple, short film. In some ways, I thought that this felt kind of like Olmi was trying to recapture the mood of Il posto but didn't entirely succeed. Still, it's worthwhile.

This is elegant sixties modernism with a subtle socialist thrust. With a bit too much technique, concentration on beautiful, striking shots and fragmented narration studded with flashbacks, the story and characters, though interesting, don't have quite enough weight to involve the viewer. The modernist love of the cryptic goes a little overboard, though in an intriguing way, as for example in the long opening sequence in a dance hall as people gather for the dance and you take a while to figure out what's going on. The man takes a career opportunity to move up from welding by going to work at a distant, isolated plant. The plant and its environs represent industrial capitalism and the city overspreading the countryside. Arresting moments, like the dog straying into the church, or the young boy working very fast in the restaurant, as well as the individuality of a variety of people glimpsed in passing, give the movie a mysterious and moving charm. Yet telling so much of the story without dialog weakens our sense of the characters. It draws you in slowly but a bit too much is withheld. Il Posto stays closer to the characters and feels warmer, though the ending of Fidanzati has magic.

This was Olmi's 3rd feature and was shown briefly in New York (audiences failed to turn out even when they were giving tickets away). It's a step forward in Olmi's artistry, after the straightforward but delightful realism of "Il Posto." Olmi uses temporal devices to elaborate the circumstances of the hero's lonely life - his long engagement, his decision to take a job offer in faraway Sicily, his longing for Liliana - and succeeds brilliantly, achieving a more artful and truly poetic style. And anyone who has spent some time far away from a loved one will feel acutely Giovanni's isolation and how his feelings for Liliana become clearer and sharper as the days that separate them accumulate. I unhesitatingly recommend this beautiful little film.

Carlo Cabrini gets a chance for a big promotion. The catch is he'll have to move to Sicily for eighteen months. He's worried about his decrepit father, and his fiancee, Anna Canzi is sulky. When he arrives in Sicily, he finds it foreign and oddly noisy and the people strange and greedy and annoying, but as time goes on, he begins to grow accustomed to its rhythms and his strange dreams the lack of a letter from Miss Canzi. Then a letter arrives....

Ermanno Olmi's ultimately very romantic movie is, when you come down to it, standard studio fare. There were hundreds, if not thousands of movies like it made and still being made. Even so, Olmi's script leaves the outcome in doubt through the end and the cinematography by Lamberto Caimi offers us Sicily first as a terrible and alien landscape that grows warm and home-like is a very seductive fashion. It's a well-told tale.

The love of a worker for his fiancée is rekindled after a long separation. The poor state of the economy in Sicily and the upheaval of its industry provides the backdrop to this touching love story. Somewhat drawn out and clumsy, however.